by Daljit Nagra
What a blessing if we could live in peace treasured ’midst our banana plantations, with honey from the hives whilst spearing beasts for their scrumptious meat. Oh and also dealing easily with the odd demon who is dropping by!
Fourteen years spent quietly, uneventfully, meditating … Could there be a blessing, a greater blessing than this exile sweet exile, in our spick-span sylvan luxury!’
Chapter One: Meet the tad Nuts Neighbour
A woman approaches Rama.
Curvaceous succulent beautification’s copper-hair-tossing
mesmeric damsel with eyes sparkling
and smacking hot lips plus bursting-out
bounteous yet conically chiselled chest-smackers!
Also with anklets jingling for a teeny
orchestra accompanying those pamper-grass sways.
Whose slender frame
was like a golden creeper
that climbs up
the kalpak tree
for the seventh
orgiastic
heaven …
Late one evening, in the thirteenth year
of their uneventful life in the forest,
amidst the creepers and plants in the front yard
Rama saw real/unreal
multitudinous perched cobra heads in gaps, on branches
near or far glinting in a hissing crucible
but all vanished as Rama saw glowing in their place
a lady comparable, perhaps, even to Sita
at the garden gate.
Said Rama ‘Namastey, dear one. What
brings you visiting us?
May I ask precisely who you are?’
Could this be a heretic disguised as an ascetic …
‘My name is Soorpanaka.’ What a bass voice!
‘I am meagred by confessing my big brother is … Raavana.’
Not meaning to be rude, Rama asked,
‘If you are Raavana’s sister
how is it you have acquired such a perfect form?’
‘I mimic our brother, Vibishana:
I too repel sin, giving victory cup only to goodliness.
I ripped into my fitness figure through awesome praying.’
Rama was wowed. But quick back into his thoughts,
‘If you are sister to Lord of the Underworld
where are your attendants? Your bearers?
You parade about unescorted?’
‘Pageantry is but dry papaya in the throat.
I stand before you with a view in mind.
It would be crude for a lady of my pureness
to unmask my smooching mission …’
But unmask it all straightaway she did,
‘I’m opened by Love-God. Only yester-morn
for the first time I see it:
your moist blue
lissom blue build.
Your aura or charisma disembowelling me giddy,
not before am I feeling weak as a frond …’
Rama watched her blush. He remained silent.
‘Not knowing you are basking beautiful in my demesne,
how much life I toiled by kissing holy feet.
Now I have peeled you from behind these trees
my womanhood can be imminent unbusted.
My slurpy idle mud-ridden life is now
heading for the blue.’
Rama pitied that blushing malarkey damsel.
Not wanting to seem austere, ‘I am from the keshatriya race …
and you are raksassy. Our alliance is inconceivable.’
‘I’m humbly saying I’m unharnessed from my brother.
I’m seeking only fellowship with good-eggs.’
Then with deep impatient breath, in, she plunged.
‘O you with the Vishnu lookliness!
If only we
marry – my brothers will unratchet their hatred
for your race.
They will bless you with overlordship of multiple worlds.
O Rama, I imagine you and me grafting together!’
Rama was amused by this stunner,
‘So the fruits of my penance and sacrifices
are to be blessed by a pack of demons …
I should trade my soul’s strengthening
for hedonistic dark sarcastic artistry …?’
Soorpanaka distracted …
What? What’s this?
Long leg walker, by nature?
In every way hot as my totty-hotness???
Soorpanaka struck by a lady coming out from the cottage.
Soorpanaka’s mouth open
as though she had bitten
hot meat.
‘Who is this?’ asked Sita.
Soorpanaka watched effulgent peach-light
porched at Sita’s feet and whirling about her till it peaked
in a teeny halo above her head.
Poor Soorpanaka realised if this bedfellow
were Rama’s, she had no chance.
She watched the pair in chat – a perfect couple.
Perfect man with woman, also perfect. All so perfect.
Soorpanaka in a spell. Thinking to herself: surely
she is beauty that remains memorable in our hearts,
that has no flaw beyond its creator’s flaws …
If my eyes cannot leave her
how she must be famishing each beholder …
Saddened Soorpanaka decided this could not be Rama’s wife
for what wife would rough it: palace or forest,
who would choose a life picking sticks and stones
when what could be had
were servants and divans on marble floors.
He must have a wife back home …
This must be his fair dinkum on the side …
Rama’s roguery, as imagined by Soorpanaka,
titillated and fondled further her Rama feelings.
Sharp as a brick, Soorpanaka butted in at the perfect couple,
‘Great one, don’t let this lady put your face in a spin!
She is some raksassy for sure.
It takes one to know one!’
Soorpanaka’s base bitch-licks hit a stonewall silence.
She changed tack, ‘Dear girl, please leaving alone
me and my beloved. We are in bona fide courtship.’
Sita turned red at hearing this odd chat.
Rama replied, ‘Dear Soorpanaka, it would please us greatly
if you departed back to your sage’s hermitage.’
Rama shut the cottage door.
Chapter One & Half: The Crazy Chukar
Lovesick Soorpanaka plans to win Rama.
What a cuss – a door shut in your face!
Really, to Soorpanaka it had never before happened.
Who dare shut the door on her and still be room-roaming?
That’s how awful could be her bad-breath wrath.
This was sad-eyed Soorpanaka.
No curvaceous succulent hotty on a par with Sita.
Not at all, in reality sad Soorpanaka
had lunatic’s matted hair,
flame-coloured fangs with birth-black teeth,
a brass-pot belly from all the rodent and fowl she eat.
Here’s a rat – shove it home, ummm what a salty tail;
here’s a cat – in one juicy bite, fur and all, get it down, dearie!
And so on all damn tubby day long.
Raavana had given his kid sister
the whole Dandaka forest
as her own domain to dominate every which way,
she was assisted by several heartless demons
including one of her brothers, Kora: terse horsey-face.
Soorpanaka, for the first time ever had chanced upon
vulnerability.
To satisfy vulnerabilities calling she had herself
changed into a comely maiden to win Rama.
But for what? Door in the face treatment.
In her new fit figure she faffed around eating
For a laugh she bit off a cow’s tail or a pig’s foot
leaving the cow untailed, the pig three-trottered and tragic.
She entered the emotional landscape
of all race and caste adhering mortals:
dreamy passivity for the lover your folks not pick for you!
Sickened by her own forest and sickening for Rama
she shut herself in a cave that was
infested with a carpet of deadly serpents.
She writhed amidst their darkness writhing.
In dreams, Rama mastered her – pinned her to a rock and
slapped her
biting her lips and bending back her legs …
After the exhausted hours, she awoke
(to the great relief of the serpents).
Fresh energy on fresh hope at winning Rama.
Back at the Godavari river and spying,
she watched Rama blitz the surface with his powered strokes.
Soorpanaka watched and thought again,
what a dish! What a sizzling fillet!
As Rama swam away, she dashed to Rama’s cottage
and saw Sita gathering flowers from the garden.
Soorpanaka imagined that if she stole, and perhaps consumed,
this gorgeous morsel before her,
Rama might in time forget losing Sita,
and soon he might sift the forest for a fresh bit on the side.
And ta-dah! there she’d be …
Soorpanaka leapt on Sita to grab her away.
To Sita, this comely woman was unusually powerful
for Sita was lifted off the ground
and swept out the garden.
But what is this? Not so fastly missus floozie …
Lakshmana had been posted behind a shaded eminence
ever-alert to a foul deed.
Soorpanaka was dragging Sita out into the thick
when Lakshmana leapt before the pair.
Soorpanaka became impolite towards Lakshmana.
His hot-head was NOT motivated to kindness
when Soorpanaka started accusing him of
incest, sodomy, paedophilia and so on …
Lakshmana took out his sword with a whip speed
and sliced off
Soorpanaka’s perfect nose
ears
nipples!
Soorpanaka watched her bits about the ground.
Shocked at Lakshmana’s swordplay
she ran off cursing the skies:
how dare a mortal flatten her frontage.
How dare he do it to Raavana’s sister!
She reached her chariot and came across Rama,
to his q & a she spoke in kind.
He: ‘What has happened? Why are you
in such a bloody state? Who are you?
She: ‘Do you not know me? Do you not
remember our courtship last night?’ Even now
will you not protect me, my Lord?
He: ‘Are you who I think you are?’
She: ‘Arrey, yes, why must you forget me?’
Rama recognised her and withered.
Soorpanaka humiliated at being, in this bodged state, watched.
Love’s folly, whilst she clutched at leaves
to cease her bloody shame
still no less emboldened was her ardour for Rama.
Her only hurt: heart-ache for him.
She begged, ‘My Lord, I can instruct you in our arts,
the magic and suchlike that make my race mighty.
I will help you defeat raksassy. My brother
will grow me back more ears, nose, nipples!’
Rama looked away.
Soorpanaka pleaded again, ‘O Rama
even now if you take me, Raavana will forgive all.
Or for this cut-cut-cutting
he will mess up all mankind. All raksassy
will go mad about earth
cleansing it free of humanity! Torture, slaughter,
genocide and suchlike are piffle words
to their mankind clean out.’
‘I think it best you return to your kind.
I will deal with them one by one or all as one.’
Just as the Chukar Partridge, from its promontory,
stares at the awesome heart of the moon
and cannot help
but stare at the heart till she’s dizzied by the gaze
and still the moon will remain stone-faced
in the face of her awful suffering
so too, even now, whilst staring at Rama
Soorpanaka felt brutal tears
like moon-lumps upon her cheeks
woozying her. How she loved Rama;
would die for Rama; he gave her no heart.
Chapter Three: Sexing Big Bro
Soorpanaka tells Raavana about Rama and Sita.
‘BASTARRDDDDS YOOOO ALLL SHUTTTING UPPPP.’
Boomed Raavana in a decahedron out-of-tune chorus
at the sight of his even more tuneless kid sister.
‘What the bastard matter is with your face, sister?
What fucker-mother-bastard fuck with you, sister?’
Soorpanaka had been repaired by the magicians
but was still hurting inside. She approached her brother
who was raving, ‘Your nipples been cut. Your nipples!
Cut too your nose.
Who so mad would stake his honour?’
‘O brother, how come you have no broadcast
about newcomers to Dandaka!?’
‘Why sister, it is your domain to dominate.’
Replied Soorpanaka, ‘These brothers seem cosy with customs
yet are resident in our woods and eyeing for a fight.’
‘They have poked their finger in a black snake’s eye!’
‘One man, Rama, is beautifully limbed and lotus eyed.
His swimming, archery and swordplay are a parable, his —’
‘Adulation? In dishonour? For a holy-moly!’
She changed the mood, ‘By their side
the hot-most paragon I ever laid my star-struck eyes on.
I swear she have torpedo chest
bombasticating through her rustic robes!’
Kora, the fiercest, was tense and terse as ever,
‘Death kill them all. All man dead.
Shall I get them and boil man-mince vats now, Lord?’
Raavana looked distracted, to Soorpanaka,
‘Draw this woman’s image.’
‘Even if I had amplitude tongues I could not enliven
this man’s hotness. His speaking is music …’
‘Can you not hold your senses from drawing him?’
Soorpanaka, still hankering for Rama, tried anew
to win him … She dreamt of Raavana with Sita
and herself with Rama. To arrange the marriage
she gently scratched
slow fine black lines across the page
for Sita’s face and
tantalising body entire.
The completed sketch matched so perfectly its subject
that it seemed to enter a godliness glow. The glow
like a wound grew and wore
into Raavana’s lust.
Raavana weakly heard Soorpanaka,
‘Even if I had amplitude tongues
I could not enliven this famed, this voguery-glamoury
lady’s hot-babe-ness whose name
even the leaves sing swishingly…
Or I cannot enliven enough her legs robust and sinuous
like elephant trunks
or her red-hot caressing smile. Or the banana whiffery
deep in her pits.’
Raavana, gobsmacked, ‘I need to compare her.’
When Raavana regained himself from the portrait
he plotted a way to compare her. To execute the plot
he sought his uncle, Mareecha,
and f
ound him buried in prayer.
Mareecha, as ever, was repenting his wild youth:
along with his brother he had rampaged
around a desert created by his mother, Tadaka.
Said Raavana, ‘Uncle, pray not to the gods,
they must be laughing at us for the insult to Soorpanaka
by a mortal who is remaining unrevenged.
He should be taxed in pain,
taxed to the ends of his shame.’
Said Mareecha, ‘I hear his name is Rama.
We should just let him live out his mere mortal term.’
‘You must break this fast and support me, Uncle.’
Raavana sat on the floor next to Mareecha and heard,
‘I once felt the arm of this Rama. He broke a great bow.’
Raavana reacted, ‘And what of it? I shook Shiva’s abode,
Mount Kailas itself.’
‘I watched this Rama without strain
kill my mighty mother.’
Raavana, usually so charismatic, again reacted,
‘I am not requesting you tell me what is good or bad here,
or who may or may not be mustering much vim.
Only I am requesting a piece of service,
and forget not how I am providing you the fortune
of winning revenge.’
Mareecha, almost mumbling,